> Can I add or create my own games?
> Soon. We’re building tools that will let anyone design their own Board games, starting with developers and expanding to players. The future of play is one you can help create. Learn more at board.fun/developers.
So I think I understand the SDK is not available yet. Can you clarify that developer tools are not yet available but are coming soon on https://board.fun/pages/developers to avoid confusion?
It sounds like you've already figured out that the registration would have to be optional, as you're planning to make it open-source (it will be open-source once you release it, it isn't open-source yet :) ).
The current people behind Board might promise to deliver now, but who knows what will happen 5 years down the line.
But clearly this product isn’t about making existing board games easier to set-up/play/clean-up. I think the marketing dept has a lot of heavy lifting to do, convincing buyers that this isn’t just Juicero for existing board games.
What’s the draw here?
Scene 0: Enter player count / difficulty / etc.
Scene 1: Map. Press UI to pick a location / scenario
Scene 2: Loads hex map and enemies, manages all NPC activity for you
Players still use physical cards, and importantly, physical stands for their characters. Would be worth discussing if the screen handles modifier cards... for physical cards the names might be on screen, then the players select their actions (top or bottom) and define movement or action targets. Some animation and NPC health / reactions are handled by software.
So there's a reduction in set up (hex maps, NPCs) and a reduction in managing NPC actions (which is why the PC versions are so appealing in the first place.) But instead of all players focusing on their own screen, they are still getting some face time and tactile board game play.
Online platforms like BGA solve both problems and are pretty cheap and constantly implement new games. And I can play with friends that have moved overseas! And if you have a regular group, you only need to pay one subscription. Could have an old fashioned LAN party for online boardgames for an order of magnitude less money.
But honestly concepts like this, mixing of physical and digital, have been tried to very little success in the gaming space for years. Out best success is wii-motion controls and rockband-era .. elaborate controllers. But there have been card games that utilized cameras to read the cards, skylanders, etc.
Actually this is closest to some of the things that original run of microsoft surface tables could do. I played some backgammon on one with physical dice and disks. It was .. fine, but it was just backgammon, they were just showing off the object tracking features. The only thing you could do with the board was some fancy animated board themes.
Anyways all of that stuff is largely abandoned. So I wish these guys luck.
I fully agree that it ultimately boils down to software: Can I implement my favorite board game for my multitouch interface? Yes. Can I bring that game to the table faster by just buying a physical copy? Yes.
I happen to have two 42" touch displays set aside for such a project - a unused backup unit destined for the living room for 200€, and damaged unit for dev work (for free). Since I bought them about 2 years ago, I also bought at least double that value of physical board games in retail, plus a Kickstarter board game. Go figure why.
However, I did play the digital version of Root on one of them, and enjoyed it very much. I should get Dune, too.
NB: I regularly see multitouch tables at trade shows. Nice eye catcher and useful to present some products or the multitude of services big companies offer.
The problem is that I see few reasons for playing boardgames, with friends, on them. You loose a lot of 'delight' factor. Physical pieces are very important to most people. I think if you asked two chess players if they would rather sit in a park and play in the sun with a physical set or play with a touchscreen inside, they would probably select the first.
I have played many digital board games, especially during covid. It's harder for me to concentrate on the game, it's less delightful. However for solo experiences and some extremes (gloomhaven) I do prefer digital games. (I also learned root digitally so that I could hurry my understanding of each faction before I played it physically with players who had a few games under their belt, and I play a lot of solo dune imperium because i love that game more than my friends it seems)
Can this product's support for physical pieces crack the 'delight in physicality' problem. Maybe. Like I said, I had some experience with this on the surface table like 15 years ago.
I think, in my experience at least, that they only time I've wanted a digital table is for TTRPG play for very tactical tables it just keeps the game moving faster than drawing a battlemap to put minis on. There is a reason I first started seeing them during D&D 4th edition where the combat was so 'on grid'. I imagine as we try out 'Draw Steel' we may revisit that more heavily as it's combat system is very 4E aligned.
The product is a concept that I want to work more than it, historically, has.
Some of the tables I saw at trade shows (e.g. E-World in Essen) this year also had them. On one you could place 3d printed power plants and various energy storage systems onto a map. To adjust their output, you could turn them like a knob. The company sold a management system for small grid operators, which then reacted to those demo inputs.
> The product is a concept that I want to work more than it, historically, has.
Sad but true. But then they don't exactly fit into the usual living room. However, as specialized board game tables are getting more popular every year, we might yet see a market for smart variants emerging long term. Not a huge chance IMHO, but larger than zero.
https://blog.azureinfra.com/surface/
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Surface_table.JPG
https://www.theverge.com/2012/6/19/3096652/microsoft-surface...
"Microsoft Surface PixelSense 'Coffee Table' Hands On"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh9cOlVFItQ
Granted, this is very hard to search for, when not being around the time it was available, as most results will be about the current tablets marketed as surface.
I consider Microsoft's one great, given its C# and .NET based SDK, instead of yet again C and C++.
Two contact types are provided: Finger – Representing a single touch point, e.g, a finger Glyph – Representing a tangible object
For each contact, you get ID, Position, and Phase. For Glyphs, you also get orientation and touched status, as in the system knows whether the object is being touched or not. There tunable parameters for the tracking system as well.
For event systems (e.g., menus, etc), BoardUIInputModule in provided in place of Unity's default InputSystemUIInputModule.
Please reach out if interested to develop: https://board.fun/pages/developers
Hopefully the technology has matured since then.
Detection technology on Board is much more robust. The MS Surface FTIR approach was lovely, but so over-featured no one could imagine a scoped-down (ie. cheaper) version of it.
It behaved very similar to the Board. It definitely had a "knob" that you placed on a screen could spin to make adjustments.
1. Launching at $500 means it is going to be a "relatively" boutique product. At around the same price as an iPad Air, you're definitely going to want to focus on how the included games simply would not be playable on a more conventional touchscreen interface without the corresponding physical components.
Which leads to my second question:
2. Are the included physical pieces modular / generic enough such that prospective game developers could leverage them in future apps, or would they essentially need to design, 3D print, or contract out to your team to create their own props?
2. The piece sets can be used as is for new games/apps, especially for prototyping! However if it’s super promising and you want to bring it into our (future) store, we’d love to work with you to make a bespoke set of pieces to go with the game. Whether the launch sets are modular enough as-is is really dependent on the ergonomics and aesthetics of the game you want to make. We’re excited to make ourselves available to devs who want to explore this though, and happy to work with folks to figure out ways forward.
Yes most of those game don't look like they significantly add anything to the experience over similar already existing games that have or easily could have tablet versions. Even if they are doing a bit more website makes them look like cheap versions of well established computer games.
Bloogs -> that's just lemmings
Spycraft -> doesn't look like something you couldn't design touchscreen controls with little effect on puzzles
Omakase -> you are selecting positions + direction within grid, don't see why press and swipe on touchscreen wouldn't work
Mushka -> the tamagochi style game. All that the special pieces achieve is select an action which could easily be done with touchscreen menu and afterwords positioning it with finger
Cosmic crush -> again one more game where all you do is move single game piece per player on a grid
Space rocks -> asteroid like spaceship shooter
Snek -> just point the finger directly on touchscreen without special game pieces
Out of all them maybe 2 look like they are trying to consider unique strengths of the physical game pieces. The cooking game and 3d block game. And even for those it feels questionable whether it provides sufficient improvement compared to existing games.
By it's nature product like this means that you get worst parts of niche gaming console and a physical board game. Niche console means that the set of available games will be very limited with many of them either being ports from other platforms using generic pieces (meaning you can just play them on those other more popular platforms) or the gameplay isn't as good due too limited budget. Hardly any developer is going to spend years to design unique game for niche platform with very limited player base. And like with physical board games you need to buy the pieces in physical store or have them delivered.
Tilt-5 also tried to fill the gap between digital and physical board games. They had much more interesting value add but that wasn't enough.
If you put capacitive material in a unique pattern on the footprint of each piece, and the rest of the piece material was conductive enough to carry your body's charge to register a touch, the shape of that touch could be unique per-piece.
There's no mention of syncing pieces, charging pieces, keeping pieces in view of a wide-angle camera, anything like that, so that's my bet. (This would also mean moving a piece using a non-conductive material would be a way to cheat by having it not get registered!)
I just shared this on LI this morning, linking back to a video showing showing related touchscreen explorations I did for a colleague in early 2013, sensing different coins by their radii as you touch them: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vmiliano_a-vertical-triptych-...
That said, the device can detect the pieces whether you touch them or not. Touching them absolutely does change the response, and we pass that along as a parameter to the SDK.
Your coin exploration is seriously cool, please hit me up when you're next in NYC!
Would this be something a home 3D printer could do? I'm not a maker but I could see the value of others being able to quickly build a universe of playing pieces if that was possible.
Board is MUCH more interesting to me if I can easily program it for my own games, especially if I can share them with others. I'm thinking about TTRPGs and other army building games where each piece has unique capabilities and rules.
It would be nice if I could buy smart bases, kind of like RFID stickers. Something I can glue to the base of an existing miniature with a 10-20mm round/square/hex base.
With those tools, I would build deep accounting assistance for complex games. If it's cheap, you could put custom terrain pieces on the Board with smart properties (hard cover, soft cover, blocks line of sight, etc).
Obviously there are lots of partnership opportunities there. You could get the table top game publishers to publish Board editions of their games that automatically keep up to date with the latest rules.
If that all works, the obvious next limitation would be board size. a 24" screen can do a lot, but many games would benefit from a screen measured in feet. That would be expensive and hard to move around though, given the current thickness.
Perhaps an intermediate solution would be support for tiling Boards. Everyone brings their own, you shove them together and have a much larger playing surface. Bezel width would be annoying here.
It is not a requirement to provide a conductive path to the person though. The patterns (glyphs as we call them) are detected and tracked regardless of whether they are being touched. However, when there is a conductive path to the person, the system detects that which provides another input vector.
3D print your goblin army, snap it to the base, touch the sword arm to attack, the shield arm to defend, etc. light up the base via capacitive to 0/1/2 inputs and you're set!
Should Mars After Midnight be released on Steam?
Game(s) that you were supposed to play was not very fun, in addition to the tracking not working well, as I remember it, but I may still have the miniatures somewhere. There was another game from the same company that I also bought at the same time, but that one was made to be played with a phone camera as some kind of AR game instead, moving some plastic objects on a table, that also worked about as well as the other game.
And why that’s worth $500. I can’t think of any game(s) that are so fun or unique I’d pay $500 to be able to play them, even with my family.
If a board game needs a computer to handle the rules, then it is a needlessly complicated board game.
Using digital tools as a DM for any sort of TTRPG is justifiable for the same reasons we use computers instead of books.
But the real problem is that players need digital tools too as the character sheet for any character with spellcasting is unworkable by hand.
Any prepared caster would need to manually copy every spell of the right level from their spell list onto paper every few level ups. If they don't write out the spell exactly as written (i.e, if they summarize) then you're opening the flood gates of rules lawyering and googling/book opening mid session.
Many other TTRPGs don't have this problem because they are designed with "playing with paper" in mind.
As for rules lawyering... That is just playing by the rules. That is how the game is meant to be played: rules as written except as modified by the group by agreement. Rules lawyering just means sticking to what the rules actually are.
Maybe you mean something else?
As for googling, why would you need to google a spell?
All the old-school OSR inspired stuff doesn't have this problem.
You should not need to repeatedly and consistently open the rule-book to play what is essentially a board game. That's ok the first time you play a board game, not ok the 20th time. You google a spell because it is much faster than opening the book. DnD combat is already way too slow as it is.
I used to make MTG style cards for spells, quest items, etc. something physical the players can keep with them.
This made casting extremely efficient as the caster has the card with the info on it. All they have to do is turn it in, roll the dice, and describe their action.
You haven't explained why it is a "horrible experience" to look at a photocopied piece of paper or to open a book to a post-it note bookmark. I do these things every day with other books, for things like work.
Are you just bad at reading books or unfamiliar with how to use them?
This is simply not true. If you want to play a pure roleplaying game, play a rules-light one. DnD is not that.
Everyone homebrews little bits so I'm not going to harp too much on that, but there's no point discussing the issues of DnD's design if we're not talking about DnD's design but rather whatever your homebrewed version of DnD is.
Did you know the game is balanced around 8 combat encounters per session? Do you know how many tables actually play that number of combats per session? It's a badly designed game.
Physical books feel better because it’s physical. You can touch it, you can smell it, you can read it, and some you can hear (when you open them or turn the pages). This is why we prefer it. However, I reserve those for the shelves at home.
If you don't want to cart books around that's fine but you can easily play the game with only the basic three (and players just need one).
If you are using a book just for a spell or an item or two you can just photocopy the page.
Idiotic thought-terminating clichés and now random non-sequiturs.
We have a lot of pages, books, novels, notes, story from the last 10 years or so that would make it physically impossible to bring with me. Bringing just my iPad and a notepad is way better for me.
Setting up a game can be tedious as well; Axis and Allies is notorious for taking longer to set up than to play, but it's a lot of fun once you get going.
Confusing rules can be ok, it depends on how complex they are (as in, what interactions they have). If the confusing rule is mostly self contained, then after playing a few times you'll learn it and it's no longer a problem. If the confusion stems from how the rule interacts with other rules, then it's a much bigger issue since you constantly need to cross-check the rules reference or worse, youtube videos and forums, on what to do.
One of my favorite games, Arkham Horror the card game, has some pretty complicated rules, but as long as they're just part of the player cards or base mechanics you eventually learn them and they become a non-issue.
It's a whole other issue when the complex rules are on specific campaign cards. Each campaign is only played a few times, so that means you never get familiar with the rule and learning it doesn't really "pay off". The campaign experience is lessened because you had to stop the game to check youtube or a forum to resolve the discussion, or just bicker and argue until a consensus is reached nobody is happy with.
As new campaigns get released the complexity of the campaign cards just keeps getting worse, requiring more prep-time as well, and my enjoyment of the game lessens as a result. The first couple of campaigns remain the most enjoyable, even on repeat plays, because they're just easier to explain to new players.
Please reach out if interested to develop: https://board.fun/pages/developers
My colleague has some discussion here about how pieces are made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45754851
Hopefully for them, this will have more luck.
On a side not, the website is completely blank on Firefox.
But you still need physical pieces to loose and store.
Reminds me of a “digital roulette wheel” I saw in a casino.. which was wierd, untrustworthy yet somehow very cool.
The issues seem exacerbated in this idea, however I think it's just as cool. I would love to play on it.
I agree that I wouldn't want new area of the map to be automatically revealed, but detecting where they were and giving me a one-click option to reveal X squares around the mini would definitely save me time at the time.
That being said, this screen is a non-starter for me because it is just too small. We use a 40+ inch screen and I'd love to go even bigger than that. Definitely not down to a (maybe) 23x13 square screen.
As a developer: I'd like to implement a "game" which would be ideal for Dynamicland (tens of cards with ID stickers on the corners), but this might be a simpler platform to set up and use. Would that be possible with the board as sold?
Good luck with the project! I hope it turns out as good as it looks (or better :D) and that someday I can justify the cost!
My hot take is that there are seem to be really two markets here:
1.) Candy crush type board games targeting kids with well-off parents. Basically really focused on immersive and interactive visuals like effects and cutscenes.
2.) Serious board games targeting older teenagers and adults playing heavy games with BoardGameGeek weightings of above 3.5 with money to spend on their own hobby. Think games like 18XX, Brass Birmingham, Dune, Terraforming Mars or Gloomhaven. They would find the digital board game experience useful for accessing expansion maps (i.e. 18xx) or expansion campaigns (Gloomhaven). Additional features of interest might be solo play against automated players, game state/score tracking, game tutorials.
It almost feels like these two groups would have such different profiles that two separate marketing approaches should be attempted.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gameboard1/gameboard-1
Mediaboard hardware is notoriously underpowered, especially with 3D. The touch response times are also questionable, usually designed for tap instead of swipe.
Please reach out if you are interested in developing: https://board.fun/pages/developers
Anyone tried just taking a picture of a messy Ticket to Ride-board with ChatGPT?
But my concern would be that this becomes just another Ad platform, but targeted at kids.
For me a board-game is offline time. So I would picture this with no WiFi and SD card based games. Which could still be profitable via an other-device app store. But would also avoid temptation for developers to add these more addictive online/networked games.
That's fair but not universal. Plenty of communities exist around playing board games online and often that's the only way to meet players of equal strength or run large tournaments.
Obviously they could add ads later, but it's a little reassuring to know that it's designed from the outset to work without an always-on connection.
edit: found this https://arkenforge.com/using-a-touch-screen-with-your-digita...
As a parent I wish it had more details on the durability. I can just imagine spills, slams, non-game pieces being used and abused on this thing.
Or maybe even a proper wargame, although I guess it might be too small.
The order form only allows US shipping adresses as is.
Or what about getting a desktop PC instead for that same price? Or a snowboard? Obviously neither of these things are alternatives to a table-top device meant for playing table games together with other humans...
What programming language is the games made in?
Can 3d printed pieces be used?
Please reach out if interested to develop: https://board.fun/pages/developers
My colleague has some discussion here about 3D printing pieces: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45754851
> Every purchase is covered by a 1-year warranty for peace of mind protection.
Uh, why are you marketing a bare minimum (often legally required) warranty as a pro? It kinda conflicts with "built to last"!
You'd be better off not even mentioning it.
Board games suffer a lot from lack of progression and narrative compared to video games.
Take Mario 1, there are so many different worlds, and enemies, it's a constant wow.
In comparison, board games are always the same. I play a fair amount of board games, but as much as I like the 'IRL' experience, the game play just doesn't compare.
Some board games try to replicate this with level bags and legacy things and what not. But make a Final Fantasy that can be played on a board with my kids, and I am definitely in.
This has huge potential.
The idea is interesting, but at the same cost (or more) as a console, or the cost of a dozen board games, it falls into a space where the market is going to be limited.
I would definitely try this if it was available at a board game cafe, just not something I need for home.
